Antibiotics are the powerful antimicrobial drug that kills or inhibit bacteria causing infection. Although antibiotics are designed to kill infection-causing bacteria, they also kill good bacteria sometimes while fighting off a pathogen.

During a new study in the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, researchers found out that during antibiotic treatment in mice, antibiotics can change the biochemical microenvironment of the cell due to which bacterial pathogens are prevented from the immune cell.

They also found that drugs trigger metabolic responses by triggering production of the molecule called metabolites which can protect bacteria from body’s immune system.

“It is not how we thought antibiotics will interact with cells especially immune cell” said co-first author Jason Yang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar at the Broad Institute and MIT “and the biochemical circumstances, remodeled by antibiotics and cells in the surrounding tissue, matters when you’re trying to predict how a drug might work in different people or in different infections.”

Antibiotic resistance is caused when they are being overused due to which bacteria become resistant to that antibacterial medication. So the main aim of researcher for facing the increasing danger of antibiotic resistance is to recognize the different types of effect of antibiotics and formulating better treatment.

The previous research also showed that antibiotic can damage mitochondria in mice and human epithelial cells. In their study Researcher infected mice with Escherichia coli and then treated them with antibody ciprofloxacin. They were given it in the quantity what a human would receive and quantified the biochemical changes. They found out that bacteria become resistant to antibiotic on treatment and alter the infection microhabitat. It was due to the change in metabolites by acting directly on mouse tissue. Even when macrophages were not able to engulf and kill Escherichia coli bacteria when treated with Escherichia coli.

Antibiotic are triggering responses in mammalian cell and reducing the benefits of immune cells instead of bacterial cells and it also reduces the sensitivity of bacteria to antibiotics.

This research reveals the importance of microenvironment for the infection and also tells how an antibody can accentuate the immune system and what specific effects antibodies have on a different cell. By knowing this it would be better to understand and find the treatment for the infection

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